The present invention relates to crop pick-ups and more specifically relates to toothbar supports for the reels of baler pick-ups.
Agricultural balers for forming either rectangular or round bales are equipped with a pick-up for conveying windrowed crop towards the baling chamber of the baler. It is common practice to construct these baler pick-ups with a reel having a central support shaft that extends the full working width of the pick-up and has toothbar support spiders or discs fixed to its opposite ends for supporting a plurality of equi-angularly spaced toothbars that extend between and have their opposite ends respectively mounted in the support spiders or discs. U.S. Pat. No. 5,394,682 issued to Frimml et.al on Mar. 7, 1995 discloses a typical pick-up reel.
Balers for making large round or rectangular bales have the capacity to process a large amount of windrowed crop. These windrows are preferably formed as wide as possible so that, in the case of hay crops, the crop can better cure in the windrow, and, in the case of large round balers, may be fed more evenly across the width of the bale so as to form uniform shaped bales. In order to gather the crop from wide windrows, it is the practice to use a pick-up which is wider than the bale being formed. This requires the pick-up reel to have toothbars which are of such a length that they are subject to being deformed during operation as when the baler passes over obstructions or clumps of crop that impose forces on the center of the reel. While such deformation can be somewhat lessened by supporting the toothbars at the middle of their length, such center supports have not been entirely satisfactory due to the fact that they present an obstacle to the mounting of the reel teeth to the center sections of the toothbars which results in a gap between tines of adjacent teeth on opposite sides of the center support which is larger than that desired for consistent good feeding of crop.